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It’s an Absurd World, So Send in the Clowns

Part of the exhibition “Aziz + Cucher: Some People” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.Credit
Hadley Fruits/Indianapolis Museum of Art

IN a new video chronicling a day in their lives, the artists Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher — life partners and collaborators since 1992 — emerge from the subway in Long Island City, Queens. They walk to their studio, where they review photographs tacked to a wall and video footage they shot in 2009 while traveling through Israel, Lebanon and the Balkans. The images are complemented by a relentless soundtrack of NPR reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the controversy over a proposed Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, blended with snatches of Middle Eastern folk music and military drumbeats.

Mr. Aziz and Mr. Cucher then perform their own folk dance, holding hands for the camera, before knocking off for the day and heading down the street toward the Manhattan skyline. Throughout, they’re dressed as clowns.

The costumes, they say, are part of their attempt to wrestle with the madness they perceive underlying everyday life in the age of terrorism and especially in the Middle East — and for them, it’s personal. Mr. Cucher, 54, was raised in Venezuela in a Zionist family that moved to Israel. And Mr. Aziz, 50, who grew up near Boston, is third-generation Lebanese and members of his extended family still live in Lebanon.

Referring to the outbreak of military hostilities between Israel and Lebanon in 2006, Mr. Aziz said, “It was especially painful for us because Sammy’s nephews were serving in the military, while my family was receiving the bombs being sent by the Israeli military.”

Called “By Aporia, Pure and Simple,” the 10-minute piece is one of four video and sound installations in the exhibition “Aziz + Cucher: Some People,” on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through Oct. 21, which looks at a range of tribal tensions, ageless and continuing. “The source of this project was a feeling of impotence and despair, watching this endless tragic thing that was older than we could imagine,” Mr. Cucher said.

“Or a clown,” Mr. Cucher added. “We felt kind of ridiculous, going around Israel and Palestine with a little video camera talking to people, but at the same time compelled. The clown is that character who tries to fix something broken and never gives up because he’s so determined, but it always comes out wrong. We felt that was us.”

This is the first time Mr. Aziz and Mr. Cucher have put themselves or their relationship at the heart of their work, which has always responded to political and cultural currents. They met in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1990, soon after politicized battles over the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and whether the National Endowment for the Arts should give money to controversial artists.

Mr. Aziz and Mr. Cucher decided to satirize the moment and became pioneers in the use of Photoshop as an artistic tool. In their pantheon of life-size photographs titled “Faith, Honor and Beauty,” made in 1992, they presented physically perfect nude models, hawking consumer items, whose genitals had been digitally erased.

“They were like blown-up Barbie and Ken dolls,” Mr. Aziz said.

“We were making fun of this idealized notion of a white society that had no room for difference,” Mr. Cucher said, noting that the AIDS crisis and the threat to gay men hung over their consideration of the body. “Advertising was pushing sex as part of consumerism, but at the same time the politics in Washington were completely censorious when it came to art.”

The series was shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1993 and widely reproduced. They continued to work together when artist teams were much less common than today. When Mr. Cucher was invited to represent Venezuela in the 1995 Venice Biennale, he had to petition to get Mr. Aziz included. “The idea that we were two gay men, living together, working together — not a lot of models existed,” Mr. Cucher said.

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Mr. Aziz, who studied documentary filmmaking, and Mr. Cucher, trained in experimental theater, have never had a signature style. The four videos in the current show — begun in 2009, when they were on sabbatical from teaching at Parsons the New School for Design and took their road trip through Israel, Lebanon, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia — are stylistically diverse, yet the artists consider them a single piece.

In the exhibition’s first room three 13-foot-tall screens show animated modernist buildings growing upward in tiny accumulating line segments and simultaneously collapsing from below into pixilated dust. Titled “The Time of the Empress,” it’s meant to suggest a long perspective on the rise and fall of empires.

“In Israel you won’t see a war wound,” Mr. Cucher said. “If a building gets destroyed, they fix it overnight.”

Mr. Aziz added: “But in Bosnia you see scars and corpses of buildings everywhere.”

The next gallery holds eight large screens, each showing a person in post-apocalyptic-looking garb contorted unnaturally before a vast desert. “They look like insects sometimes, trying very hard to move, but they’re caught in this kind of paralysis,” Mr. Cucher said. Called “In Some Country Under a Sun and Some Clouds,” it responds to how the artists view people on opposing sides of ethnic conflicts getting stuck in their positions.

“After a couple of months of traveling, we heard the same kind of ideological debate at every dinner table repeated again and again, just with a slightly different nuance,” Mr. Aziz said. “They weren’t actually learning from each other, they were just repeating the monologues.”

They created a soundtrack with fragments of folk music, amplified as if carried on the wind, and inserted incidental moments far in the distance, like dancers celebrating and weaving across the desert or a man in a hood dragging a dead body. “It was meant to suggest the tragicomic state of affairs that was our experience when we visited the Middle East,” Mr. Aziz said.

In the third gallery, “Report From the Front” looks like a straightforward documentary about an archaeological dig. The narrator authoritatively reports on “trans-historical contamination” and “irrefutable evidence,” yet the words are ultimately nonsense as the intention of the excavation is never revealed. The voice-over, by Mr. Cucher, is a spoof they wrote by appropriating language from published reports of excavations, which in Israel are highly politicized. The one they filmed was of Christian students from the United States digging for evidence of Jesus.

It is only in the fourth gallery, when the straight-faced clowns pore over street shots of Israel and Lebanon, that the elliptical narratives of the previous videos come into sharp focus.

“They’ve taken this topic that seems like it’s impossible to represent and found an aesthetic structure without being heavy-handed about it,” said Lisa Freiman, who organized the show for the museum, where she heads the contemporary art department. “There are all these moments of the everyday and then a kind of absurdity that’s combined with it — whether it’s the clowns or the voice-over or these people who are stuck in the same place or the buildings that do the same thing. The contrast between things feeling as if they’re progressing and knowing that they’re always staying the same is an interesting metaphor for history and lived experience.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2012, on Page AR25 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s an Absurd World, So Send In the Clowns. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe